Doing Community Service With Your Child With Autism

Doing community service with your child with autism can be tricky. They really can’t go somewhere alone to serve nor would you want them to for that matter. Most colleges and scholarship opportunities require some sort of community service. It’s also an excellent character trait to instill in your children regardless of special needs.

How to achieve this goal requires some thought as well as commitment. I like to include the family in community service. We do it as one of our field trip days, Make a Difference Monday. It’s on the calendar for every Monday so everyone knows that we will go out and serve as a family that day. This makes it just a matter of checking with the organization to see if they will give community service hours for high schoolers. I tend to not tell them about Logan’s autism unless it’s necessary. I first approach it as we want to serve as a family. I’m sure helicopter parent comes to mind in that conversation.

Things we’ve done:

Deliver food boxes to the elderly

Serve at a food pantry

Eat or serve meals with the homeless at a homeless shelter

Coordinate a food drive for a food pantry

Pack food for backpacks for distribution to children at schools to take home for the weekend

Do a monthly craft time at a nursing home

Take care of or plant a garden at a children’s home

Raise money for Team Jimani which bought an aquaponics system for an orphanage in the Dominican Republic.

Do a game night at a local women’s shelter or children’s home

Work at the library

Help take care of the horses and stables at hippo therapy

Stuff envelopes or do office work for a local charitable organization

Read books to children at a preschool or to seniors at a nursing home

As you can see, the opportunities are boundless . You just need to be creative . Learn to keep meticulous records of time spent doing community service. Most organizations are much more inclined to sign off on a form if they don’t have to look up the hours. Some places will want to do that but it’s still a good idea to make sure the hours are correct. In the end, you make memories and your child gets another checked off for his high school requirements.

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About Us

Call me Penny, wife to Michael as well as mom to Logan who has autism and Madison who is pursuing a dance career.
Based on my own personal and often difficult experiences with autism, I hope to educate families of children with autism on how to navigate their world from pre diagnosis to adulthood.